My article on Alvin Schwartz’s and Stephen Gammell’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series made its debut in the terror-loving pages of Rue Morgue last month for their 169th issue. The article was published under their regular “Classic Cuts” banner, an ongoing feature of the magazine that argues for a work of art’s inclusion in the pantheon of genre greats in roughly seven hundred words.

As I said at the start of the piece, “[f]or readers of a certain age, no other book cleaved as deep an impression in their formative gray matter as Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Today, just mentioning the title is enough to awaken a grinning nostalgia in even the most casual literary plunderer. It seems that anyone who was a student from the year of the first book’s publication onward has at least heard of it at some point. Whether these kids knew it or not, Scary Stories had become part of their Canon.”

Of the three films that Boris Karloff acted in for producer Val Lewton’s horror unit at RKO, ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945) tends to get the short shrift. This is a bit of an unfair match, especially when one of the other movies is THE BODY SNATCHER (1945), directed by Robert Wise and based on the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s undoubtedly one of the greatest horror pictures of the 1940s, with an unmatched turn from Karloff as the utterly insidious resurrection man-cum-murderer John Gray. The other film, Mark Robson’s BEDLAM from 1946, the last of Lewton’s run of terror productions, is a solid period piece that has Boris essaying the more layered but no less nasty role of asylum-keeper Master George Sims.